Apple's New Notebooks and ....

Advanced Camera for Surveys hit a snag when being brought out of safe mode when the low voltage power supply to the ACS Solar Blind Channel was commanded on, software running in a microprocessor in ACS detected an incorrect voltage level in the Solar Blind Channel and ACS entered safe mode.

The original failure caused NASA to cancel a scheduled shuttle launch to service the telescope. The 15 year old Hubble was designed to be upgraded and serviced to extend its lifespan and take advantage of technological advances. This service mission, the 4th such since Hubble was launched in 1993, was designed to replace all six gyroscopes, install new batteries, and exchange a degraded Fine Guidance Sensor with a new one.

Astronauts would have also installed two new instruments, the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). WFC3, which sees in visible, infrared and ultraviolet light, will improve Hubble’s sensitivity 10-30 times.

Hubble’s out-of-commission instruments, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). STIS stopped working in 2004 and ACS failed in 2007.

The agency is also considering flying back up components for the recently failed ones which could be installed during the servicing mission.

24 dipole magnets and 5 quadrupole magnets were damaged when one of 10,000 soldered connections failed on the LHC. They also lost six tons of helium and had to suspend operations for the rest of the LHC’s programed schedule for this year. CERN says they are on schedule for resuming operations during their planned time in the spring.

Rollo Carpenter, 43, [is] a computer scientist from Devon, whose program Jabberwacky has spent years developing a conversational style via millions of web chats. Some of its conversational partners confide in it every day; one conversation, with a teenaged girl, lasted 11 hours.

Aegis Mobility, a Canadian software company, announced Monday that it has developed software called DriveAssistT that will detect whether a cell phone is moving at car speeds. When that happens, the software will alert the cellular network, telling it to hold calls and text messages until the drive is over.

20 pins, aux channel (mics, cameras, touchscrn), easy expansion. of protocol
All the ports are now on one side (left), and the optical drive is on the right
Aluminum Block Construction – Rigidity, Weight, Aethetics
General Upgrades: Processor, Hard Drives
Multi-Touch Trackpad that pivots along top

* Blu-ray is a bag of hurt. I don’t mean from the consumer point of view.

* It’s great to watch movies, but the licensing is so complex.

* We’re waiting until things settle down, and waiting until Blu-ray

* takes off before we burden our customers with the cost of licensing.
NO FIREWIRE!!!

Apple has been known to be the first to remove technologies that are aging.

Floppy Disks, Built-In Modems

What do we lose with this?

Networking over FW – Windows doesn’t support it (not a big loss)

External Hard Drives

Target Disk Mode – your computer as an ext HD – No USB support

THEDEAL-BREAKER: Cameras. Newest HDV cameras use USB, but FW ones are still sold, and Pro DV cameras use FW.

Another Deal-Breaker – Pro Audio Interfaces!

[MBP|MacBook Pro]: Firewire 800

MB: No Firewire at all

5 Years ago, I was touting the universality of FireWire on Macs as a reason to convert to some of my conflicted friends. Makes sense, since Apple initiated development on it. Now that was 1995, but it still competes with the standard connections (USB and CAT5)

CAT5 – bottleneck is often the network card of the other computer (if a pc), or more likely, your router or switch.

USB – though it has better specs than FW400 on paper, it is quite a bit slower (10-40%, numbers vary) in real life. Also, node-based is nice – don’t need to carry around USB splitters. Though, we’ll be carrying around Mini DisplayPort adapters, so we should get used to it.

One thing I love about my [MBP|MacBook Pro] now is that I don’t usually need any extra cables or baluns. Firewire 400 and 800, DVI are there. Now, [MB|MacBook]Air needs a USB-CAT5 Balun, Micro-DVI adapter, [MBP|MacBook Pro] needs a FW800-400 balun, a Mini DisplayPort adapter.

Not a fatal mistake for Apple – they’ll get their way once my computer breaks down, but I’m clutching onto this model for dear life for as long as I can.